Friday 15 November 2024: As is always the case, he beats me to it, by whom I mean Rowan Williams, my favourite Christian theologian-philosopher, who in the current edition of the Times Literary Supplement singles out as his ‘Book of the Year 2024’ the same one I would identify if I was asked – Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Harvard).
Rowan says this about it: “Charles Taylor, still impressively active in his nineties, has added another enormous volume to his long succession of magisterial studies (including Sources of the Self [CUP, 1989] and A Secular Age [Harvard, 2007]) in the making of the modern imagination.”
I couldn’t agree more. Not least as I have read with huge profit both of the earlier books by Taylor which Rowan mentions, and several others, notably The Language Animal (Harvard, 2016) and his super survey of Hegel’s philosophy (CUP, 1975). All I know about Hegel, which I like to think is a fair bit, I owe to Charles Taylor!
Rowan sums up Cosmic Connections in a way I wish I could, which is why I will quote him further in full: “[It] muses on the rise and fall of a particular model of the mind as a solitary device for processing atomized elements of data delivered from outside, so as to optimize our use of the raw stuff we confront. From very early on this “disenchanted” picture has had passionate critics. Taylor tracks this critique from the first Romantics through to T. S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz, with close readings of a range of poetry in English, French and German. This is a brilliant diagnosis of some of the most corrosive weaknesses of modernity – political as much as literary.”
Yep, that is Cosmic Connections in a nutshell. While a long sprawling book (nearly 600 pages) – because it does lend itself to speed reading, it took me ages to get through – it is rarely dense and regularly illuminating. Its chapter on T. S. Eliot is very good, I think. The one on Gerard Manley Hopkins sadly less so for it seems to this reader of it not to rely enough on relevant secondary literature. But this is a minor quibble of mine because the overall impact of Cosmic Connections on me has been hugely positive.
Here are ten sets of words from it which I have copied out because I agree with them and because I think they are worth having a discussion about. They also provide a sense of what the book is about:
“Art yields not just insight, but a strong experience of connection – it transforms our relation to the situation it figures for us” (p.18)
“It is not clear that all facets of human life can be understood within the terms set by natural science . . . Phenomena like value, morality, ethics, and the love of art seem to require explorations which can only be carried out in vocabularies which are validated or not in hermeneutic terms” (p.47)
“The poet is not a simple observer; s/he connects with the scene” (p.51)
“The best art always has a depth dimension” (p.71)
“The modern development of rationality and instrumental reason has alienated us both from own emotional nature and from the Nature we live in. Our destiny is to heal both these rafts together, which involves restoring harmony between human beings in society” (p.96)
“We need a relation to the world, the universe, to things, forests, fields mountains, seas, analogous to that we have to human beings we love and works of art; where we feel ourselves addressed and called upon to answer” (p.130)
“Western epistemology has tended to sideline much of what happens in our encounter with things to concentrate on the takeaway message . . . Poetry goes beyond epistemically driven prose . . . It enters a new terrain, which involves a break with the primacy of mapping” (pp.170, 175 & 177)
“There is an exhilaration in liberation through poetry, which is lacking in clinical description” (p.285)
“History seems to offer no guarantee that the forces of light will always prevail” (p.564)
Advances in justice have to be accompanied by forward steps in reconciliation” (p.575)
Thursday 7 November 2024: Trump back in the White House. Gawd help us all! How could the American people make such a disastrous decision?
These e-mail words, written by a mate of mine, were received by me earlier today, to which I replied: Because, Alan, they weren’t taken in by the ‘trickle down’ nonsense you economic liberals wrongly assume floats all boats. Despite Joe Bidon’s assertion that ‘democracy’ was on the ballot paper, it wasn’t. High grocery bills and poor health care provision, on the other hand, were.”
Instead of promising greater social and economic democracy to the economically left behind, Kamala Harris’s campaign was premised largely on the ‘defend democracy’ sentiments of affluent suburbanites. Rightly, this stress on ‘democracy’ did not cut through to the marginalised and less well-off. Why should they care when it doesn’t deliver on their felt needs and relieve them of their lowly circumstances? Indeed, why should it matter when Harris’s party is itself hardly an embodiment of it, as Dennis Broe explains HERE
Martin Kettle in this morning’s Guardian, however, agrees with Alan, thinking that American voters have lost their senses: [They] have done a terrible and unforgivable thing this week. We should not flinch from saying they have turned away from the shared ethos and rules that have shaped the world, generally for the better, since 1945. Americans have concluded that Trump is not ‘weird’, as it was briefly fashionable to claim, but mainstream. Voters went out on Tuesday and voted weird in huge numbers.
Really? The implication in both Alan’s and Martin’s comments is that 73 million Americans are thick suckers. (I recall something similar being said about the 17.5 million people who voted Leave in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum.) For sure, some are. But all of them?
Maybe a large percentage of Trump’s supporters were more angry than daft; and maybe they thought the Democrats were out of touch and not on their side. A middle-aged woman voter possibly was speaking for many of them when she said, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, but I haven’t seen any benefit from it.
Jeff Balls of the Community Alliance for the People remarked similarly: Harris wasn’t really speaking to the people’s issues. I felt like most of her campaign was mostly about blaming Trump.
And the US columnist, Glenn Greenwald. had this message for her: You and the corporatist and militarist party you lead just got your ass kicked all up and down the US, because Americans see that you only care about enriching yourselves at the corporate lobbying trough, If the humiliation you just suffered doesn’t usher in some humility and self-reflection, nothing will.
Bernie Sanders in this open letter published earlier today agrees:
It should come as no great surprise that a Democrat Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is the Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheque to paycheque and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.
Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.
Today, despite strong opposition from most Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all-out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disaster campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.
Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, isn’t someone I often turn to for political insight, but his editorial on Trump’s victory isn’t I think far wrong: Kamala Harris was the ideal candidate for Donald Trump: a West Coast liberal lawyer with a rictus smile, an undistinguished record as vice-president, and an opaque policy platform. She smiled and laughed a lot during the campaign, she preached progressive orthodoxies, she rallied with Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, as if the showbiz elite could persuade provincial, working-class America to vote for the Democrats. The truth is she had nothing to say to Americans disillusioned by economic hardship, alarmed by immigration and the porous southern border, and alienated by identity liberalism.
Team Starmer must surely beware. For if voters here don’t soon experience in their daily lives evidence that Labour is fixing the problems that make their lives shorter and meaner they will rightfully look at what other parties have to offer, even entertain more extreme alternatives.
Team Starmer should then consider shifting its focus away from GDP – ‘growth, growth and even more growth’ – to living standards and the quality of people’s lives more generally.
Sunday 3 November 2024: Today, at St Wilfrid’s Church, Harrogate, I attended a solemn All Souls’ Day Requiem Mass, recalling positively during its liturgy the memory of deceased people for whom I had a deep affection when they were alive – my father, Dorothy and Patrick Eavis, Paul King, and Christopher David among them.
Although All Souls’ Day is a prescribed commemoration in the RC church, it isn’t in the Anglican communion, excepting in churches like my own, which is Anglo-Catholic. The result is that observance of All Souls’ in mainstream CofE churches is not widespread.
And its reputation among atheistic secularists is not high either. They associate All Souls’ with superstition, particularly at that moment in the liturgy dedicated to prayers for souls said to be trapped in purgatory. This happened today immediately after the homily when the preacher-celebrant said, “Let us commend to God those who journey into his nearer presence”.
I did not say “Amen” to that because my Christian understanding of eternal life (set down HERE) excludes any suggestion that after I die my soul (I will say something about that notion later) is transported to a non-material holding place where its heavenly worthiness is tested and improved.
In my theological book, a state of eternal life is not journeyed to after I die. Rather, it is embraced long before my death day in proportion to the extent to which I live in God’s image, It’s why I always say this prayer under my breath at the end of Mass: “God give me the will to live each day in life eternal”.
I am also hostile to the non-inclusive requirement – equally set down in the liturgy – that the deceased prayed for on All Souls’ must each be members of the “faithful departed”. Those without faith don’t qualify.
Several of the people on my prayer list this afternoon, additional to the ones I named at the start, would not lose any sleep over that because they’d be very annoyed to think I thought of them as members of “the faithful departed”. Each trenchantly ignored the church’s doctrines and services, while intellectually finding theism, including my own non-literal version of it, so much bunkum.
I like to imagine however they still wouldn’t mind the fact that I recalled them thankfully and supportively this afternoon. All the believers and unbelievers I prayed about today lived lives extremely worthy of emulation, aspects of which they generously gifted me, helping to construct my identity in a fashion that would have been impossible without their assistance. In different ways, they each helped me to be more God-like, which is Good.
In the Thomist theology I subscribe to, all Good comes from God. Accordingly, the Goodness they embodied came, unacknowledged by them, from him. During Mass today, I accredited and gave thanks for that, praying in each case that their example will continue to influence for the better the conduct of my life going forward.
But, no more than that. The idea that they might each be in that holding place called purgatory I mentioned before, and that I could help them in my prayers better to get out of it, didn’t once cross my mind.
I am sure most Roman Catholics, and some Anglo-Catholics, reading the previous paragraphs would consider my conduct at Mass today to be profoundly unorthodox, even an abuse of the liturgy.
Unlike me, they take the idea of purgatory very seriously, including literally. Today’s preacher did, that’s for sure, telling us all at one point that several passages in the NT unambiguously justify the idea of intercessional prayer for souls that are ‘alive’ in an interim state after death in a place of torment.
I don’t consider such passages do any such thing. And I also don’t think Scripture in any event works like that. Yes, it has its own special cosmology, But It is a pre-scientific one in which, as far as I can tell, purgatory does not even play a straightforward obvious part. But that’s another story for another time.
There’s also tied up in this mix the vexed idea of ‘soul’, which the notion of purgatory interprets as some kind of disembodied essence. Again, there is a big argument behind all of this which I can’t go into here.
My conclusion to it however goes summarily like this: soul is not separate from the body (Plato’s view), though (after Aquinas) it does have a special form constituting that immaterial part of me that makes me me (look, I know this is not straightforward), which is not distinguishable from my body; as such, my non-material soul and my physical body interact, each being the flip side of the other; I don’t so much then have a soul as exemplify having one in what I say, do and think during my lifetime; after death, this soul ‘lives on’, chiefly in memory and in various significant ‘deposits’ left behind. This website is one of mine. Another is my children. There are others, which I also won’t go into now.
On All Souls’ Day today I therefore recalled approvingly the souls of individuals whose material lives have ended, but whose lifeforces positively survive, both in my life and in the lives of those theirs lovingly touched.
Theologically speaking, the Mass also enabled me to give voice to the idea that Goodness never dies, confirming my belief in the possibility of an eternal life unrestricted by the material one I am living in the here and now. What I mean by all of this is set down in that link I mentioned earlier – click HERE.
In these disenchanted secular times of ours, which have largely lost any sense of the divine, I am struck by how few public opportunities there are collectively to remember the dead in the spiritual fashion I did today, unless you count Armistice Day as one, which I don’t, thinking it is more these days to do with showing off national pride – a showcase for British patriotism – than corporately grieving over those killed in battle since 1914.
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The Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, once said that “culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense”, I agree, which is why attending the All Souls’ Requiem Mass at St Wilfrid’s this afternoon added lots of spiritual value to the material life I mostly lead.